An inspectorate given the task of controlling activities in a major sector of industry is essentially faced with a large-scale sampling problem. Many locations may offer a potential threat of violation, so a prudent yet effective use of available inspection resources is called for. Above all, priorities must be defined.

An important example arises in the context of recent attempts to eliminate chemical weapons through an international convention. Section 6.1 of this chapter focuses on what is probably the most difficult verification problem associated with the newly negotiated Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), namely the control of activities not prohibited by the agreement, in particular those which involve the large-scale industrial use of the so-called key precursors. The discussion is used to develop a simple but rather general solution to the resource distribution problem.

In our presentation we will take Thoreau seriously and aggregate all verification details into a priori detection probabilities specific to given inspection locations or possible ‘violation paths’. The term global sampling, which heads this chapter, is intended to characterize the class of models treated. At first, overall detection probability is the single optimization criterion and the option of legal behavior on the part of the inspectee will be ignored. Later, in Section 6.2, we develop and apply a theory of global sampling which additionally takes into account subjective preferences regarding the attractiveness or seriousness of individual violation activities.